


Becoming A Night Vale Citizen

by orphan_account



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-02
Updated: 2013-10-02
Packaged: 2017-12-28 05:17:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/988138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>6 listeners make their way into Night Vale and find themselves splat in a war, neither imagined, decipherable nor peaceful in any way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Becoming A Night Vale Citizen

"You wouldn't understand," she says, zipping up her bag, fumbling as she tries to shove all of her heart inside- "you never hear it. You're always asleep and you never wake up no matter how much I try, you just PRETEND, I have to go-"

"Please, Patricia, please don't, this is insane." He clutches at her arm, eyes shimmering. "I can be better, I can try harder anything you want, please."

"This isn't about you, Joey! I have to find that town. I have to."

"It isn't real! It's not on any maps, or-"

She pauses. Fixes him with a devil laser guided glare. "You read my diary."

"You didn't give me any choice! You were acting so-so-so off and I thought you were having an affair-"

She throws back her head and howls. She stuffs herself in a zipper hoodie and grabs her rucksack off the chair, storming out of the kitchen. The last he sees of her is her back, resolute against streetlight. The grandfather clock in their hallway behind to chime. Midnight. Witch's hour, twilight's mistress and the sun's bane. 

She puts her hands on the wheel, knuckles tight like a neck's vice and screams into the dashboard. Then she rams the keys in, dials the radio to soothing static and presses down on the accelerator. The headlights are dim in the distance by the time he rushes out the door. 

His eyes are wet. 

\--

She drives. She hums Bohemian Rhapsody. As soon as she hits a road she doesn't know her heart smooths over like a pebble in a lake, glistening and dark. She doesn't know it yet but her car begins to speed and slow at once. She drives through a snowstorm, thunderstorm and a hurricane unscathed. 

She always takes a left. 

On the thirteenth or seventh hour of her drive she gets out of the car to stretch. She isn't hungry. She may never be again. 

As she steps on the gravel by the side of the road, desert blankness stretching for miles, night still here(wherever here is), she notices something. In place of any sort of barren atmosphere, there are giant, fluorescent blue jellyfish misting past her. She reaches out and her hand snaps back like electricity bit her fingers off. She looks up and where the stars should be is simply a shimmering surface. Like she's under the ocean. She can only see the reflected, blurry vision of the night sky, stars reduced to glowing spheres and without edges or outlines. 

Her mouth slightly open and her skin feeling too tired to process any of it, she gets back inside the car and raises her eyebrows at the clock. It is now 38:69 LM. 

She tries to turn the radio dial, but it's stuck on kidz bop parodies, sung by a reggae rapper to the tune of Everything Has Changed by Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran. 

She checks her backseat to find that all of her belongings have turned into turnips. 

She bites into one and keeps driving. 

\--

She pulls up at a Taco Bell-Pizza Hut combination restaurant eventually. It's the first food place she's spotted in days. Weeks? Seconds?

She steps out of the car and walks inside. Nothing seems to be out of the ordinary. Just people, sitting in red leather booths. Well. Okay. It seems less like a fast food stop and more like a classic 50's diner. There's waiters on rollerskates serving up waffles and fries. There's a bell on the counter and an open window into the kitchen. The speakers are blasting out country music. 

She slides onto a divider table and looks at the menu. She looks up at the waitress, bleached blonde and tired-looking. "Night vale or desert bluffs ma'am?"

"...what?"

"You with night vale or desert bluffs?"

"Um. Night vale?"

"Alrighty then sweetheart, this' your menu. Enjoy."

"Wait. Wait. Excuse me, but what is this place?"

"Safe haven for people like us," says a man in the booth beside her, donning a red baseball cap. "You ain't the first one com' chasin' after a town on the radio. Neutral territory for them desert bluffs folk too, but you wouldn't catch me chattin' with any of those vis-uh-ray freaks."

The waitress adds, "Now, Lem. No taunting allowed during business hours."

He belches and shrugs. "Heya, name's Lem."

"Patricia. Pleased to meet you. How long have you been here for, Lem?"

"Giver take ten years, a century, hon. I got done stuck here on my way back. Wanted to go home for Christmas. Never did get Santa Claus," he said, chuckling. 

"Wait, so you travelled to night Vale in-"

"Was a union man, now wasn't I! Part of the good UMWA. Though it wasn't so good at the end, if ya read your Colorado history."

It dawned on her. "No," she said. "Not the ludlow massacre."

"Everybody I know done cut up to ribbons or shot to shreds like dog meat. The rest were up in their arms in good ol' fashioned revenge. My best mate's blood was soaked into my clothes one night after an attack. I heard a voice when I was walkin' after his funeral. Followed it down to Trinidad all the way back to ludlow. Found myself snap damn in night vale! Then one day I reason to myself, spiders in my trousers and miracles an' all, my mam's still waitin' for me to come back home for st nicks. I start walkin' out the borders. Saw some things you ain't never want to wish on nobody. Then I ended up here. Been too spooked to move since. Life's a bitch, eh, but maybe you'll be luckier."

Patricia looks down at her menu. Some of it looks normal. The rest looks....bloody and heartful. Literally, full of hearts. 

She orders whale fries and butter ketchup on the side, with a liver shake, today's night vale special. She looks on to the lighter side of the diner. Her vision shimmers, but for a moment she imagines all the patrons on that side have blood curling down their cheeks like kohl. A girl, alone, sitting under a hanging naked bulb, turns to look at her. She's got adorable pigtails.

She grins at Patricia until her gums nearly recede. Patricia doesn't know what to do but stare, until a hand on her shoulder draws her to attention. 

"Those desert bluffers are strange as hell, darlin'. Don't look for too long. Especially the kids. I hear tales that after one broadcast for them snappers, they eat their parents alive, make it to that town with a shotgun and a scooter alone."

"But that doesn't make any sense." She protests. "We're all still normal people. We haven't even reached the towns we're looking for yet, this is just a...a temporary road. We haven't changed. Kids are still...kids."

"You sure about that?" Another traveller says, turning to face her. She's beautiful, with cropped black hair and blue eyes. "Look at your hands."

She looks down. On the back she's starting to see a lunar eye form like tattoo ink on both her hands, purple and lilac.

"We all started transforming when we got into our cars," a teenager says from the corner booth. His girlfriend leans out from her seat to face her. "C'mon, sit with us."

The woman and Patricia look at each other. The former shrugs, gets up, as does several other loners. Lem sits and his eyes gleam. 

"How about introductions?"

The teenage boy says, "I'll go first, then. Hey, I'm wes. 17. Heard Cecil when I was 16. This is my second week of driving."

His girlfriend goes next. "Arabella. Bells for short. 18. Got hooked before I met Wes."

The young man across them says something in Chinese, then coughs. "Jiawin."

The girl across signs, then mouths something vaguely like "Catherine". 

The woman who'd talked to her is Marianne. She introduces herself as Patricia. 

Marianne leans forward and says, "What's the first thing you guys are gonna do when you get there?"

"I want invisible pie," Wes and bells chorus, and they laugh. Patricia curls up with her chin on her knees and says, "I want to paint the glowcloud."

"Wo yao kan na ge mao," Jiawin says. Everyone looks confused. He grabs a napkin and smears ketchup all over it and holds it up. The shape is a cat. 

Everybody rouses with "khoshekh!" And they all laugh. 

Catherine makes some climbing notions and mouths radon canyon. 

Marianne leans forward and says, "I want to be a station intern."

"Do you have a death wish?" 

"That's suicide, girl."

"Shit, man. I'd rather work for Cecil for 10 straight days then go back to mundane for 10 more years. Think about it. We're migrating to a fuckin' town where jet planes roar through showers, deer-mask men burn up libraries and comment on fashion choices, mayor choices are between the dragon and the faceless old woman, you really think we won't die one way or another? I'd rather do it for the radio then, I don't know, getting on the subway."

"You could be like Dana," Patricia suggests. 

"Yeah. Fuck. Maybe."

"I'm excited." Bells says.

"We could die, bells."

"We could die at any moment."

"Wonder why the town chose us?"

"Yeah."

"Cuz if heaven and hell decide that they both are satisfied, illuminate the no's on their vacancy sides," Patricia sings. 

Catherine mouths, "if there's no one beside you when your soul embarks-"

\--

"-will follow you into the dark."

Their cars pull up like a procession in front of the Arby's.

They'd said goodbye to Lem, who'd said to say hi to Old Woman Josie.

"I left my fiancé behind," Patricia blurts out to Marianne as they approach the door to the Arby's. 

There is a man rolling around on the ground, whispering "earth cavern forbidden shaft". They tip him as they pass. 

Cecil's standing under the lights with his arms open. Wes breathes out a gust of wind, which blows around for a while until it settles. 

"Welcome, new citizens," he says briefly. 

"Oh my god," Marianne whispers. 

"Welcome to night vale."

"Lem says hi," Patricia tries to say, but her throat is dry. Here is the man. Semi-man? That has whispered beautiful and horrifying things to her in the dead of darkness, comforting and terrifying all at once. She's imagined him a thousand times. She's listened and relistened. Here he is in front of her. 

"You each have been chosen." He says gravely. 

"...chosen? For?" Jiawin asks hesitantly. 

"For a militia."

Something clicks in bells' face. 

"Fuck." She huddles closer in her jacket. "Oh, fuck. It's strexcorp, isn't it? What did they do to Josie?"

"I do not know. That is why I called you here, each of you."

"But us? We're just-we're just 6 normal people."

Cecil shakes his head. "But that is precisely why you're what we need. Or, the sheriff's secret police, anyway."

"We're-we're going to be in the sheriff's police force?"

"Not exactly." A high voice forms behind them. They spin around. 

An 8 year old girl with braids-oddly similar to the girl Patricia saw in the diner, stands in the car lot. She's holding a bloodied book. 

"Hello, tamika."

"These're our new recruits? Not giving me much to work with, are you, Cecil?"

"I apologize, tamika, but those strexcorp JERKS shut down our alarm dream system so I couldn't send mass dreams of screaming bowl of worms-"

"Out of all the people you could have called, only these six made it across the border?"

"Yes. I'm sure they're up to the task."

She tosses the head of a strexcorp employee over to Catherine. Unflinching, she snatches it out of the air and punts it into the trash can. Tamika grins. 

"Keep up, rookies. Strexcorp curfew ends in a weeping willow, and I'm tired of hearing trees weep."


End file.
